Chapter 4 Blog

The emergent literacy process is the current method for teaching reading and writing for kindergarden through second grade students. This process includes research that is child-focused (i.e. the age that researchers found that language readiness begins is much younger than previously believed). Other aspects that are now considered are the cultural and social aspects of language learning as well as their personal understanding of written language. Reading and writing are incorporated in emergent literacy. To "hook" the young minds into reading, teachers may apply the process into the classroom in various ways such as shared reading and/or literature focus units. Children will learn that letters actually have value/meaning through their own experiences in their family life or communities. Children's interest in written language can be introduced or demonstrated by teacher activities that produce classroom rules or labeling supplies, furniture, etc. This reinforces the value of written print. Personally, I believe that labeling is effective as I, to this day, recall my teacher having every item labeled when I walked in to her classroom the very first day of school. She went a step further and color-coded our name tags; red for girls and blue for boys to reinforce what I know I had learned at a very young age. In first grade, my teacher, Mrs. Camacho, would ask us to write her notes during quiet time should we have any questions regarding anything she had talked about in class. I guess, perhaps, they were ahead of their time since this was 30+ years ago.
Emerging into writing is probably one of my favoriate areas. When I faciliated an after school program that included children between the ages of 5 and 11, it was fascinating to see the younger children attempt to immitate the older children's writing and drawings. One of my rules was that they complete their homework before being allowed to have play time and if they were not assigned homework, they must read any book in the room for 20-30 minutes and draw a picture that represented any thing of the story...a character, a setting, or something that occured in the story. This would almost always present an opportunity to interact with the child and assist him or her with spelling or defining a word. This is considered interactive writing. Minilessons is discussed in the final pages of the chapter. Minilessons are geared for children to learn about how reading and writing are used to convey messages and how children behave as readers and writers. The example of a minilesson that the textbook offered is for making predictions. The five parts of the minilesson are: introduction of the topic, sharing examples, providing information, supervising practice and reflection of what was learned. The only activity that I can recollect that is perhaps an example of this type of minilesson is a project that we were asked to do every new year during English class, draw a picture or bring in an item to help as a visual aid to a recollection of what events took place during our summer vacation. After the written part of the project, my classmates would write a summary for each student's story.